The Beginnings of Radical Compassion: Empathy

The Beginnings of Radical Compassion: Empathy

Compassion, empathy, understanding; words often thrown around as demands or hurled as insults in the negative. In modern society there is a dearth of true compassion and a surplus of performative compassion often masking tribalism or demands for concessions around various beliefs. What is it about this elusive concept that is so difficult to grasp, and even more difficult to actualize??

Over the next few weeks, I will be posting a series of articles discussing my own journey towards greater and greater compassion, as well as offering practical exercises one can do to begin to develop the skill of compassion. Each article will be a blend of anecdote, practical experience, and background. At the end of the series I will tie all of them into a discussion of how I hope to blend compassion into my career in law, which hopefully will offer a window into how to take this skill into the world and your own life.

I. Empathy

Jesus, the messianic figure of western christian traditions spoke often of compassion, often coupling it with patience, humility, kindness, and gentleness;? and was often going out of his way to care for the sick, the poor, and those who many saw as lesser or undeserving. Mohammed, the last prophet in Islamic tradition, taught of service to others and kindness to all of humanity in the hope that one day all people would live compassionately and freely. The Dalai Lama, the foremost Tibetan Buddhist leader, said last year Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive." and "Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them.” Even in fiction we have authors like Steven Erickson writing ten book fantastic epics where the primary theme is compassion and understanding.

Why then is this concept of compassion, so deeply rooted in both religious and secular traditions, so difficult to truly achieve and often so limited in its application by those who claim it? The answer is both complex and simple. Compassion is difficult because it is hard. It takes practice, day in and day out. It takes self evaluation and discipline. To talk about compassion fully we will need to first define it and some terms we will use throughout this discussion. When I say compassion, I don’t mean simple empathy, which is not really simple anyways. When I say compassion I am talking about a deep, open, empathetic understanding of another person as a whole. When I say compassion I am talking about recognizing and validating another person’s experience of the world from their perspective. When I say compassion I mean a true and abiding belief that another person’s experience is equally valid and nuanced and informed by their experience as my own, even when I don’t agree with it; in fact especially when I don’t agree with it. Notice that in all of my definitions of compassion, never once did I talk about changing another person’s mind. So now, with compassion loosely defined, we will talk about parts of compassion and what they individually mean in this context. We will also talk about how to enhance and practice these skills, to get us closer to this concept of radical compassion that I will define later on. First up, we will speak of empathy.

Empathy

Empathy on its own is a valuable skill, that is different from sympathy and pity, but often mistaken for them. Empathy most simply put is the ability to appreciate and relate to the internal emotional experience of another person. Empathy is the beginning of compassion, and it is the part that I still need to work on the most. Notice again that I have twice referred to these parts of compassion as skills, and not qualities. Certainly some people are naturally more empathetic at a baseline than others. Whether this is due to an increased amount of mirror neurons, or a different kind of upbringing, or a host of other factors, this baseline is no different from a person who is taller having a baseline advantage over a shorter person when it comes to dunking a basketball. However, just being taller doesn’t mean that you will be better at basketball, it just means that in some areas of basketball you will have an easier time than someone shorter. Compassion is the entire game of basketball, empathy is just one skill to practice.

I will speak personally for a moment, as an anecdotal example, and then more broadly about how one learns to increase their ability to empathize. When I was younger, I suffered a horrific trauma at the hands of a family member, it closed me off and was part of turning me into a selfish, self centered, person whose entire life revolved around not feeling the thing that happened to me. I was not the only one who suffered, but my story is mine to tell and theirs is theirs. Suffice to say the way the eleven year old me found to cope with this trauma was to numb myself in any way I could, first with marijuana, then alcohol, then as I got older and my access broadened, to all sorts of other mind numbing substances and behaviors. None of these things allowed me to connect to or understand another person in any way other than a surface understanding of how to manipulate them to get the thing I needed to not remember my trauma. I removed that set of coping skills from my life in 2010 and have not had alcohol or other major mind altering substances since, but that didn’t all of a sudden grant me the skills that were now more than a decade delayed and underdeveloped. I had to learn these things. I had to learn how to listen, to empathize, to forgive myself and others, and I began to develop what I now term as radical compassion.

I don’t know if my stunted empathy was the sole result of my trauma or if I had always had a low baseline. In reality it doesn’t matter, the lack of empathy was palpable in my interactions with others. Even today, over thirteen years of practice removed, I still sometimes feel stunted and need constant reminders and practice to not go back to the default setting of closed off.? How did I learn to empathize with others??

Unintuitively to me at least, it actually started with understanding myself, and my own behaviors. I couldn’t begin to empathize with other people when I still couldn’t understand myself. One of the exercises that I did with a mentor was to write down all the things that I was angry with in the world. Let me tell you that list was long. From institutions, to people, to family, there was something cathartic about just putting on paper all of these feelings I had never really looked at as a whole. Then this mentor asked me to do something unexpected, he asked me to look at each of these things I was angry about and look at what part of me was threatened, injured, or attacked by the thing I was angry about, and then write that down as well. This was far less cathartic, but equally important. Understanding what part of me was threatened or injured was the precursor to his dirtiest and most important trick of all. After I had this near novel of anger and injury, he then asked me to take out everything from each anger and injury and to write down only my part of it. For many of them, my only part was in how I reacted to the injury done to me. I had no responsibility for the assault I endured at eleven, but today and in the future I had a responsibility for how I acted or reacted to it. For others, I was an active participant in my anger and injury. My anger at educational institutions for failing me was also my fault for never actually participating in them fully or doing the things I was expected to do. The failures of the system were important, but so too were my own failures within the system.?

Understanding myself led me a beginning of understanding other people. We will talk more about forgiveness later, and it came later for me as well, but without that initial understanding and empathy towards myself I could never have learned to channel it outwards and being to empathize with others.?

This first step in empathy was huge, and it allowed me to empathize with others, but it was only the beginning. Empathy is the beginning of compassion, but it also has to be practiced daily. To really empathize with another person you need to practice understanding them. One of the best ways I have found to do that is not by asking a bunch of questions, but simply by listening to them and then telling them what you heard and understood and then allowing them to correct or agree with your understanding. This skill is often called reflective listening, and though it sounds simple, it is incredibly difficult to do consistently. I constantly have to remind myself to do it, even when it is in circumstances that I am explicitly trying to do it. Whenever I have done this successfully, I have gotten feedback from the people I am talking to that they felt heard and understood. This becomes harder and harder when we are talking to people we disagree with, or when we find their ideas to be detestable or dangerous or immoral. However, this is when this skill becomes even more important. While this is by no means an exhaustive description or discussion of empathy, it is a good beginning.

Next we will discuss the second skill in compassion, humility.